Fiona Powrie FRS, FMedSci is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. She gained a PhD in immunology from the University of Oxford and then moved to the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto. She returned to the University of Oxford in 1996 where she was the Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology and Head of the Translational Gastroenterology Unit from 2009-2014.
Fiona’s research has identified the functional role of regulatory T cells in intestinal homeostasis and established the cytokine IL-23 as a therapeutic target in chronic intestinal inflammation. Her current interests include characterization of the interaction between the intestinal microbiome and the host immune system and how this mutualistic relationship breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis and cancer.
Fiona is particularly interested in translating basic research into clinical application. She leads the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre’s Gastroenterology and Mucosal Immunology theme and recently established with colleagues the Accelerated Therapy for Arthritis Programme, a clinical research network designed to increase the testing of novel therapies in the clinic. She is Director of the Wellcome Trust funded 4 year PhD programme in Infection, Immunology and Translational Medicine. She serves on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards including the Sir Francis Crick Institute in London, The Imagine Institute in Paris and the Evergrande Centre in Boston. She is co-Chair of the Wellcome Trust Interview Panel. Among other distinctions she received the Ita Askonas Award from the European Federation of Immunological Societies for her contribution to immunology in Europe (2009) and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2012. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011, EMBO in 2013 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014.